Grants – California Digital Libraryhttps://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo
The Official CDL BlogFri, 14 Dec 2018 18:07:53 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.1Toward a national archival finding aid network: collaborative planning initiative receives LSTA funding supporthttps://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2018/10/31/toward-a-national-archival-finding-aid-network-collaborative-planning-proposal-receives-lsta-funding-support/
Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:20:11 +0000https://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/?p=22930More...]]>CDL is excited to announce that we will soon be embarking on a collaborative planning initiative, in partnership with regional/statewide archival description aggregators, to explore a “next generation” finding aid network — one that which would continue to serve the statewide functions of the Online Archive of California (OAC), while potentially offering more extensible and broader discovery for archival materials.

Many archival description aggregators across the country, including the OAC, struggle to find sufficient resources to update their platforms and to engage with some of the most promising advances in archival description. By pooling resources and establishing co-development partnerships, we believe we can address this challenge collectively and, consequently, extend the capabilities, breadth, and depth of existing aggregations. Together we can provide users with more meaningful and richer access to archival records than any one of us can alone.

With crucial funding support by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), administered in California by the State Librarian, we will be embarking on a preliminary one-year collaborative planning initiative (October 2018 – September 2019) with the following key objectives:

Explore the possibilities of shared infrastructure and services among current finding aid aggregators, to test the theory that collaboration will benefit our organizations, our contributors, and our end users. If so, identify potential shared infrastructure and service models.

Determine if there is collective interest and capacity to collaborate on developing shared infrastructure.

Develop a concrete action plan for next steps, based on the shared needs, interests and available resources within the community of finding aid aggregators.

Developing a collective understanding of requirements and challenges is a necessary first step for establishing the trajectory of any future finding aid aggregation effort. We hope this planning initiative will move us beyond that analysis to the common goal of developing a robust, sustainable, shared infrastructure to leverage the advances in archival description that promise to enhance research and discovery in the future.

Over the coming weeks, we will be posting additional information about the initial planning initiative to an online project workspace.

]]>Community-Owned Data Publishing Infrastructurehttps://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2018/10/24/community-owned-data-publishing-infrastructure/
Wed, 24 Oct 2018 18:45:47 +0000https://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/?p=22887More...]]>As a library community, we continue to struggle to find scalable approaches to offering open, shared, sustainable scholarly infrastructure. This is especially true in the data publishing and research data management space where institution-focused approaches to capturing and curating data may be hindering our ability to grow adoption by our researchers.

To alleviate this impasse and jumpstart a new community-led approach, California Digital Library is formally partnering with Dryadto build a globally-accessible, transparent, and low-cost data publishing and curation service. The goal of this partnership is to completely reimagine the potential for Dryad, acting as an open, free community hub for collecting and curating data for researchers. It is not intended to compete with existing institution-based services, but to complement and amplify each of our campus’ efforts.

We hope that we can start a global discussion with institutions worldwide on better ways to support institutions and researchers in the face of rapid commercialization of the research data space. We cannot do this alone. For our collective action to effectively leverage institutional knowledge and serve researchers as end users, we need a diverse group of institutions to participate in defining the goals and values of this activity.

What does this look like?

We are putting the finishing touches on the migration of the Dryad service onto CDL’s technical platform. Dryad is a trusted name in the researcher community and, with this technical shift, it will be a space where institutional members will have transparent reporting features and the ability to join a global data curation community. Dryad will also be positioned to enhance technical integrations (via API) with publishing partners to seamlessly capture data publications at the time of article publishing. This means that we will be able to simultaneously drive adoption of data publishing and offer digital curation and stewardship in one space.

Supporting shared scholarly infrastructure must be done by the community and for the community. To help jumpstart this process, California Digital Library and Dryad will facilitating several one-on-one discussions and community workshops in the coming months to determine the features and services most needed in our community.

Our first community workshop will be held in December after CNI in Washington, DC. With funding from an IMLS National Infrastructure grant, we will host a facilitated discussion on institutional values, needs, and potential community-based business models that meet our collective goals, support our researchers, and create a sustainable, attractive new Dryad service offering. Our goal is to chart a path forward for this movement and gain concrete institutional commitments to joining the Dryad community.

How do you get involved?

Institutions: If a member of senior leadership would be interested in participating in our one-day workshop on December 12, 2018, please contact the UC Curation Center (UC3) at CDL for more information.

Don’t Worry: There will be additional workshops planned in the US and abroad. We will keep you posted on future opportunities to get involved in this important initiative. Please contact contact the UC Curation Center (UC3) at CDL for more information for more information.

CDL is pleased to announce that we have received an additional year of grant support from the California State Library, enabling us to aggregate and provide even more comprehensive access to unique digital resources from cultural heritage organizations throughout the state.

“Harvesting California’s Bounty” is an initiative supported by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), administered in California by the State Librarian.

The goal of the initiative is to bring together digital collections that are otherwise dispersed across a range of library, archive, and museum systems. Although these collections are available online through local websites, they are often not readily discoverable. Through harvesting, aggregating, and displaying the collections on Calisphere and the Digital Public Library of America websites (DPLA), CDL provides the collections with increased visibility and usability. Given that a number of them were created with the support of LSTA funding, it is all the more important that they remain publicly available, findable, and usable for the long term.

With another year of grant support (October 2018-September 2019) the CDL will have staffing capacity to focus on harvesting additional collections from organizations in California, with an emphasis on working with public libraries. We anticipate harvesting a number of new resources, ranging from a broad array of historical materials digitized through the California Revealed initiative, the Los Angeles Public Library’s Travel Posters Collection and Menu Collection, important material from the CSU Fresno Armenian Studies program, and a host of potential new local history collections from across the state that are being managed using the PastPerfect museum collection management software.

Building on previous grant phases, the breadth and depth of publicly-available research collections available from California cultural heritage organizations through Calisphere continue to grow at a fast clip, and now represent one of the largest subsets of content in DPLA.

]]>Cobweb Update: Establishing a Collaborative Collecting Projecthttps://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2018/06/27/cobweb-update-establishing-a-collaborative-collecting-project/
Wed, 27 Jun 2018 18:29:08 +0000https://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/?p=22374More...]]>Over the next few weeks, we will be conducting user testing of the Cobweb functional prototype along with a few high-fidelity wireframes to learn from potential users about what they’d consider most useful in a collaborative collection development platform. One of the core functions of Cobweb that we’re getting in front of testers is establishing a new collecting project in order to get a collaborative collecting initiative off the ground, as might be the case, for example, in responding to a current event-driven collection imperative.

What to Know to Start a Web Archives Collecting Project
Before initiating a collecting project, web curators often need to know whether and what kind of collecting activity has already happened around a given topic and to know what kind of interest others may have in its documentation. It’s often the case that a topic can best be documented by encouraging and facilitating the participation of more than one organization with collecting capacity to spare and as many individuals as have topical expertise to share. And it certainly happens that multiple organizations may approach documenting the same topic, sometimes independently and other times in coordination. The Cobweb platform is intended to address both of these use cases. We’re continuing to build a registry of descriptions of seed URLs that have already been crawled and are held by organizations as part of their pre-existing web archive collections. (As illustrated below, it’s worth noting that Cobweb is not the repository of record for such descriptions, nor for web archive collection storage or access, but rather is an aggregator of metadata describing collections and the seeds they include.)

By building as comprehensive a registry as possible, we are providing vital transparency to project organizers to help them understand how their collecting intentions might overlap with or can complement collecting that’s already happened. For example, “fake news” is a timely topic and we’re aware of multiple approaches to documenting this online phenomenon, though visibility into both captured content as well as content that’s intended to be captured on this topic is currently hard to come by. When they establish collecting projects in Cobweb, project organizers are making visible their intentions so that others can determine how their web archiving activities may fit in. Ideally, participation in Cobweb will allow for better informed collecting as well as potential collaborative partnerships.

Setting Up and Describing a New Collecting Project
Cobweb provides curators of web archives the ability to establish and organize thematically-driven collecting projects that can include participation from multiple organizations and individuals.

Once logged in, a project organizer can set up a new project and add some descriptive and administrative metadata to that project. Project organizers can identify other project administrators and can set the status of the project, whether it’s open for nominations or inactive, for example. Project organizers are also able set a nomination policy for the project, whether it’s open for public nominations or requires that nominators are either logged in to Cobweb or included within a defined list of nominators.

Additionally, project organizers and participants will be able to add project-level notes to communicate with each other and add information that is not captured in structured metadata elements.

Elements available for describing a Cobweb project include a title, narrative description to indicate the topical scope and motivation behind the collecting project, and tags. Within Cobweb, tags can be created anew or are made available for re-use to describe not just projects, but also the seed URLs that are nominated to projects. These descriptors will serve as an important means of finding and making connections between Cobweb projects and resources, helping participants identify where they can best apply their expertise and resources to archiving the web.

To get involved with or simply ask for more information about Cobweb, contact Kathryn Stine, Cobweb Outreach Manager.

]]>Cobweb Update: How Cobweb Facilitates Participatory Web Archivinghttps://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2018/04/04/cobweb-update-how-cobweb-facilitates-participatory-web-archiving/
Wed, 04 Apr 2018 17:31:34 +0000https://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/?p=22088More...]]>Given its breadth and depth, archiving the web can seem an overwhelming endeavor. Digital curators typically approach web archiving by first determining what to collect based on the collecting scope established by their organization. Once they’ve identified the general theme on which they want to focus their web archiving collection development, they need to assess just what content on the web might be of enduring research value and, as such, would be worth the effort involved in its archiving.

Selecting web-based content for archiving might feel daunting owing to the sheer amount of dynamic information with which we engage online. And web archiving is often time-sensitive – for example when curators attempt to document a quickly-unfolding event and from multiple perspectives. Not a day has passed in recent memory without the potential, if not pressing need, for someone to have the foresight, organizational capacity, and resources to document our social, cultural, and political moment through the ways in which current events are represented online. To build informed, useful web archives, many recent event-driven collecting initiatives have extended calls for nominating websites to the general public. Digital curators can also deepen the research value of the web archives they build by engaging subject specialists and researchers to bring their insights to nominations and collecting decisions.

Cobweb supports the distributed work of nominating websites for inclusion in web archive collections by allowing project organizers to establish, describe, and manage thematic (topical and/or event-driven) collecting projects. Cobweb collecting projects can involve multiple organizations and as many participants as organizers need to address their documentation goals. Depending upon curatorially-assigned project policies, participation may be restricted to a set of designated individuals or freely open for public involvement. Cobweb project organizers can be digital curators affiliated with collecting organizations or they may be researchers, community members, activists, or anyone with an interest in participating in documenting web-based content. When just-in-time collecting gets going, project organizers can quickly set up a collecting project in Cobweb and share a project link out through their networks to encourage participation by soliciting nominations and capture capacity to crawl those nominations. Nominators contribute websites of perceived value to a collecting project either when they are included in an established, constrained list of nominators or by engaging in projects with an open, public call for nominations. Collecting organizations with motivation and capacity to include nominated websites to their collections then claim nominations in which they have an interest. It is possible, and often beneficial, for multiple organizations to claim the same nominations. Organizations that have successfully captured nominated websites make good on their claims by having their updated holdings reported back to Cobweb. Again, multiple organizations may hold any given nominated and claimed site.

Promoting visibility across the functions involved in participatory web archiving is a key goal for Cobweb. We’re looking forward to sharing how we’re designing and developing Cobweb to both support and make visible the coordinated steps that go into realizing thematic collecting projects with testers early this summer and in our project briefing at the CNI Spring 2018 Membership Meeting in San Diego, April 12-13.

To get involved with or simply for more information about Cobweb, contact Kathryn Stine, Cobweb Outreach Manager.

]]>Cobweb Update: Supporting Collaborative Web Archivinghttps://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2018/01/05/cobweb-update-supporting-collaborative-web-archiving/
Sat, 06 Jan 2018 00:46:40 +0000https://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/?p=21677More...]]>Not unlike the arachnids to which we allude in the Cobweb name, the team behind this open source service platform designed to support collaborative collection development for web archives has been industriously working up an initial prototype of the system. With a production launch set for October 2018, we will continue to be busy through the coming months as we iterate on the current and next prototypes, refining functional requirements and interface design in response to what we learn from those who build collections of web resources as well as those who use these resources in their research.

The tools that Cobweb provides will bring subject specialists, digital curators, and researchers together to coordinate the work of building thematic web archives by allowing them to:

establish thematic web archiving collecting projects,

nominate web resources for capture,

claim nominated web resources with an intention to capture them, and

contribute descriptions of those web resources that have been captured.

Descriptions of web resources included in Cobweb can serve as a community registry, searchable by anyone looking either to grow web archive collections or find archived web resources useful to their research. Towards this end, concurrent with developing functionality for the Cobweb system, we are also actively working to populate the Cobweb database with descriptions of web resources currently stewarded by archiving organizations, starting with those made publicly available via the Archive-It OAI-PMH metadata feed. By including as many descriptions of already-archived web resources in Cobweb as possible, and by allowing subject specialists to both nominate and describe web resources that are candidates for archiving, the platform will provide opportunities for curators to make informed, contextually-based decisions about where and how to grow thematic web archive collections.

Cobweb both supports and is dependent upon engaged use by and across communities of curators and researchers. As such, we’re reaching out to these communities in a number of ways. Since beginning work on Cobweb in earnest last year, we’ve been engaging in conversation with web archiving practitioners to better model, and thus support, the workflows they’ve developed to collaborate across organizations and between individual roles in developing thematic web archive collections. We’ve also been getting the word out about Cobweb at a range of conferences and meetings to invite both broad and deep participation in the building and ultimate use of the platform. Late last year, we had the chance to share Cobweb progress at the 2017 Dodging the Memory Hole conference, where the themes of collaboration and community involvement in developing and providing access to digital news collections both resonated with and reflected the work that we’re doing with Cobweb.

To get involved with or simply for more information about Cobweb, contact Kathryn Stine, Cobweb Outreach Manager.

DMPTool is delighted to announce that the California Digital Library has been awarded a 2-year NSF EAGER grant to support active, machine-actionable data management plans (DMPs). The vision is to convert DMPs from a compliance exercise based on static text documents into a key component of a networked research data management ecosystem that not only facilitates, but improves the research process for all stakeholders.

Machine-actionable “refers to information that is structured in a consistent way so that machines, or computers, can be programmed against the structure” (DDI definition). Through prototyping and pilot projects we will experiment with making DMPs machine-actionable.

Imagine if the information contained in a DMP could flow across other systems automatically (e.g., to populate faculty profiles, monitor grants, notify repositories of data in the pipeline) and reduce administrative burdens. What if DMPs were part of active research workflows, and served to connect researchers with tailored guidance and resources at appropriate points over the course of a project? The grant will enable us to extend ongoing work with researchers, institutions, data repositories, funders, and international organizations (e.g., Research Data Alliance, Force11) to define a vision of machine-actionable DMPs and explore this enhanced DMP future. Working with a broad coalition of stakeholders, we will implement, test, and refine machine-actionable DMP use cases. The work plan also involves outreach to domain-specific research communities (environmental science, biomedical science) and pilot projects with various partners (full proposal text).
Active DMP community
Building on DMPTool’s existing partnership with the Digital Curation Centre, we look forward to incorporating new collaborators and aligning our work with wider community efforts to create a future world of machine-actionable DMPs. We’re aware that many of you are already experimenting in this arena and are energized to connect the dots, share experiences, and help carry things forward. These next-generation DMPs are a key component in the globally networked research data management ecosystem. We also plan to provide a neutral forum (not tied to any particular tool or project or working group) to ground conversations and community efforts.

Follow the conversation @ActiveDMPs #ActiveDMPs and activedmps.org (forthcoming). You can also join the active, machine-actionable DMP community (live or remote participation) at the RDA plenary in Montreal and Force11 meeting in Berlin to contribute to next steps.

]]>CDL receives LSTA grant funding to expand access to more collections through Calispherehttps://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2016/07/06/cdl-receives-lsta-grant-funding-to-expand-access-to-more-collections-through-calisphere/
Wed, 06 Jul 2016 20:24:57 +0000http://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/?p=19487More...]]>CDL is pleased to announce that we have received funding to expand our metadata harvesting operations for Calisphere, enabling us to aggregate and provide even more comprehensive access to unique digital resources from across the state of California.

The initiative is supported by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian. The funds will enable the CDL’s Digital Special Collections team to add a temporary (15-month) programmer/analyst position to work directly on tasks related to staging and conducting metadata harvests of hundreds of additional collections from libraries, archives, and museums in California.

The collections range from at-risk audio-visual recordings contributed by UC Libraries and other organizations as part of the California Audio-Visual Preservation Project (CAVPP) — to early stereographs from the California State Library, and local history resources from institutions such as the Oakland Public Library and Sonoma County Library. Once harvested, the collections will be made available through Calisphere, adding to over half a million unique research resources that are now broadly available to UC users and the broader public. The metadata for these collections will also subsequently be made available through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

While these collections are currently available online through local websites, many are not readily or easily discoverable at statewide and national network levels. Aggregating these disperse digital resources will ensure they are findable, and will undoubtedly reveal new connections for researchers.

]]>DMPTool wins Sautter awardhttps://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2012/07/03/dmptool-wins-sautter-award/
Tue, 03 Jul 2012 22:25:44 +0000http://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/?p=11835More...]]>The DMPTool, http://dmptool.org/, has won a Larry L. Sautter Golden Award for Innovation in Information Technology. The Sautter Awards were established by the University of California’s Information Technology Leadership Council in 2000 and are awarded annually to “encourage and recognize innovative deployment of information technology in support of the University’s mission.” The DMPTool is one of five winners of the Sautter Award this year.

The DMPTool is an online service for creating data management plans, and was developed in response to requirements from funding agencies that researchers include data management plans in their grant proposals. The DMPTool now supports requirements of 5 major US federal funders, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Studies, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The DMPTool also supports one private funder, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

The DMPTool is available to all researchers, regardless of institutional affiliation, and allows them to:
• Create ready-to-use data management plans for specific funding agencies
• Meet funder requirements for data management plans
• Get step-by-step instructions and guidance for your data
• Learn about resources and services available at local institutions to help fulfill the data management requirements of grants

The DMPTool was developed by UC3 in collaboration with NSF-funded DataONE project, Digital Curation Centre, Smithsonian Institution, UCLA Library, UCSD Libraries, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and University of Virginia Library. By joining together, these partners were able to develop the tool efficiently and quickly by consolidating their expertise. The primary goal of the partnership is to support researchers and keep their grant proposals competitive, while highlighting services and resources that we provide to researchers.

The award will be presented at the annual UC Computing Services Conference (UCCSC) at UC Berkeley in August.

]]>Prototype interface released for searching archival authority recordshttps://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2010/12/20/prototype-interface-released-for-searching-archival-authority-records/
Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:49:15 +0000http://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/?p=9068More...]]>CDL’s Digital Special Collections program is pleased to announce the public release of a draft prototype historical access system for the Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC).

SNAC is a two-year research project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, that is creating a set of authority records by extracting information from archival finding aids and enhancing it with other sources. The project uses the new standard Encoded Archival Context—Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF). Data for the research is being provided by the Online Archive of California, among several other sources. Learn more about SNAC.

CDL’s role in the SNAC project is to build a prototype interface that links the authority records in a “historical social network.” Such a system has the potential to significantly expand access to a range of humanities resources, as well as our knowledge of the connections between people, families, and organizations over time.

The user prototype is being developed using an iterative approach. This first release of the system provides the most basic functionality required for researchers to imagine how they might interact with archival authority records. Development of further iterations of the prototype will continue through Spring 2012.

Tell us what you think!

We welcome your suggestions on both the design of the prototype interface and the processing of the data. What features do you think would be most useful for researchers?